business, deposited cash rather than collecting it. He wasn’t what you would call a conversationalist. She wasn’t stupid, she knew it was a front. Was there a nail bar or tanning salon in the world that wasn’t? But she had kept her mouth shut and run a nice place, although you had to wonder why the Inland Revenue didn’t question the fact that she was shifting so much money. And it was just Crystal, no trafficked Vietnamese kids enslaved to the file and polish, like you saw in other places. ‘More trouble than they’re worth,’ Jason said, as if he knew about these things.
For work, Crystal had worn a spotless white uniform – tunic and trousers, not the sexy-nurse kind of outfit that you could get for hen nights – and kept everything clinically clean. She was good at what she did – acrylics, gels, shellac, nail art – and was proud of the attention she gave to her job, even if trade was sparse. It was the first thing she’d ever done that didn’t involve selling her body in one way or another. Marriage to Tommy was a financial transaction too, of course, but to Crystal’s way of thinking, you could be lap-dancing for the fat sweaty patron of a so-called ‘gentlemen’s club’ or you could be greeting Tommy Holroyd with a peck on the cheek and hanging his jacket up before laying his dinner before him. It was all part of the same spectrum as far as Crystal was concerned, but she knew which end of it she preferred. And, to quote Tina Turner, what does love have to do with it? Fig all, that was what.
There was no shame in marrying for money – money meant security. Women had been doing it since time began. You saw it on all the nature programmes on TV – build me the best nest, do the most impressive dance for me, bring me shells and shiny things. And Tommy was more than happy with the arrangement – she cooked for him, she had sex with him, she kept house for him. And in return she woke up every morning and felt one step further away from her old self. History, in Crystal’s opinion, was something that was best left behind where it belonged.
And she had lots of shells and shiny things in the form of a huge wardrobe of clothes, a diamond bracelet and matching pendant, a gold Cartier watch (given to her by Tommy on their first anniversary, inscribed From Tommy with love), a high-spec white Range Rover Evoque, a black American Express card, a child, Candace – Candy – who she adored. This was not the order that Crystal ranked her assets in. The child came first. Always and for ever. She was ready to kill anyone who touched a hair on Candy’s head.
She had met Tommy when he came into the salon one wild and wet afternoon, looking attractively dishevelled on account of the force-eight gale outside, and said, ‘Can you give me a quick manicure, love?’ He was on his way to a meeting, he said, but couldn’t turn up with his hands ‘covered in oil and muck’. He’d had to change ‘a bugger of a tyre’ in a lay-by, apparently, on his way back from Castleford.
Tommy was surprisingly chatty and so was Crystal, if only professionally (‘So are you going on holiday this summer?’), and one thing led to another. As it does. And now here she was mashing a tell-tale stub of a cigarette into a Swiss cheese plant – an ugly thing that refused to stop growing – and wondering if the washing-machine with his shirts inside had finished its spin cycle.
Tommy’s first wife – Lesley – had been a smoker and he said that the smell of cigarettes reminded him of her. He didn’t say whether this was a bad thing or a good thing, but either way it was probably best not to summon up the ghost of the first Mrs Tommy Holroyd in his presence with a packet of Marlboro Lights. ‘She was a bit unstable, Les was,’ Tommy said, which, considering what happened to her, could have been funny if it wasn’t so horrible. It was an accident (Crystal hoped), but you never knew in this life when you might slip and lose your footing and find yourself going over the edge. Crystal trod a very careful path these days.
Crystal was hovering around thirty-nine years old and it took